Galaxy S23 Debuts in Geekbench, Showing a Considerable Lead Over Samsung’s Current Generation Flagships
As February dawns on us, so does Samsung’s legendary event, unveiling the company’s flagships for the year. As we all know, Samsung is prepping the Galaxy S23 series for launch early next year. While we know some things about the phone from earlier leaks, Samsung has done a good job of keeping it under wraps so far. Recently, the phone was even spotted on Geekbench by smartphone enthusiast Abhishek Yadav.
Samsung Galaxy S23 spotted on geekbench.
– Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 " Kalama "
1 × 3.36 GHz
3 × 2.02 GHz
4 × 2.80 GHz
– Adreno 740
– 8GB ram
– Android 13#Samsung #SamsungS23 #GalaxyS23 pic.twitter.com/1ITjLZr5IS— Abhishek Yadav (@yabhishekhd) October 17, 2022
Samsung’s declining competitiveness in advanced semiconductors may spread beyond the company’s chip business. Though non-memory semiconductors manufactured on a contract basis account for only 7% of total semiconductor sales, the performance of Samsung’s own smartphones depend on the company’s CPUs and image sensors. Apple, a competitor in smartphones, outsources all of its CPU production to TSMC, and the technology gap with TSMC could develop into a gap with Apple in smartphone performance.
We know Samsung is very unhappy with its semiconductor unit for failing to keep up with TSMC. The gap is so big at this point, that the company has resorted to using Qualcomm chips on its own flagships, and even upper-mid range phones now. The Geekbench leak further confirms, the Galaxy S23 series will be armed by Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 SoC.
Another interesting tidbit, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 was initially rumored to use four types of cores, rather than Qualcomm’s standard tri-cluster design. But as the Geekbench leak shows, that doesn’t seem to be the case and the SoC has a single core clocked at 3.36GHz, three cores clocked at 2.02GHz and another four cores running at 2.80GHz. Apart from the chip, the phone also features 8GBs of RAM, coupled with the Adreno 740 GPU.
As for the scores, they are plenty impressive, and a decent step-up from Samsung’s last generation S22 series. The upcoming Galaxy S23 supposedly gets a single-core score of 1524, and a multi-core score of 4597. While this is still behind Apple’s A15 Bionic Geekbench scores, it does manage to comfortably beat phones with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC.
But as the recent Pixel 7 series show, you don’t really need the bleeding edge in chips to make a great phone. Up until a few years, Android phone were really starved of processing power, and you could see the experience get smoother with every new chip release cycle. But that isn’t the case anymore, and even mid-range SoCs are able to perform admirably in most cases. It will be more interesting to see what Samsung does in terms of the camera, software and its overall ecosystem.
